In my last article I come off as a technophobe of a sort, or at least a techno-skeptic, and weird as that might sound, I think this perception might actually be accurate. I think of technology as a tool for solving problems and doing things that you want to do. If it creates more problems than it solves, does it really fulfill its purpose?
I’m a techno-skeptic (with a dozen working computers of all kinds in the household) because I see how people use technology. If someone was spending his life hanging out in a bar and wasting time in superficial, shallow conversations, we would recognize this as socially unacceptable, something worthy individuals don’t do. However, this is exactly what social media is: shallow people wasting time in superficial quasi-dialogue, and it’s all worthless and going nowhere. The only one actually profiting from it all is the bar owner.
Technology gives every kid an opportunity to become the smartest person who ever lived. You can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, plug it into a TV, keyboard and mouse, and install a free Linux OS on it that allows you to access the vast tomes of knowledge on the web, play multimedia and write code in multiple programming languages. And how many use it for that? How many of you did sudo apt-get install gcc?
For 200 EUR you can buy a smartphone that’s actually a 8-core pocket supercomputer with Geekbench 3 score of over 4000. You can load it with a library of books and music, you can use it to access Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, you can use it as a multiple-language dictionary, interactive road map with satellite navigation, you can use it to SSH-connect into a remote server, to write and execute Python code, essentially you can do everything a personal computer can do, that doesn’t require a keyboard and a big screen. Its price makes it accessible to almost anyone, and even for 50 EUR you can get a device that gives you most of those capabilities. Based on that, you would expect the people who own such devices, and the even more powerful ones, to be the smartest and most capable of all people who ever lived. Instead, they are barely literate, with poor mental focus, disastrous social skills, horribly limited general knowledge, are ignorant of history, philosophy, politics, art and science, they have very poor understanding of technology in general, and people in the 19th century would see them as retarded scum that lacks both education and proper upbringing.
Does it mean that I think that children should not own smartphones and computers? Of course not. My kids use whatever technology they need. They both have laptop computers and mobile phones. They both play videogames. However, they play Minecraft and Universe Sandbox, not Call of duty, and to them computers and mobile phones are not a life-substitute, but a tool. The older one can write code in Logo, Python and some c, and the younger one can tell you everything about masses and composition of planets in the solar system. Guess why? They read, they talk to adults, they use their brains.
The worst thing that can happen to children is to spend too much time talking to other children, because with other children there’s no positive intellectual and emotional differential, there’s just ignorance, prejudice, and a very violent and abusive pecking order. One of the main reasons why elderly people were so respected in the traditional communities is that they used to talk to children, to teach them true and useful knowledge, and do it in a calm and peaceful way that would unplug the children from the frenzy the other children caused. Children are actually the worst thing that can happen to children, because the only thing children usually learn in the company of other children is how to establish an abusive comparative ranking based on usually completely arbitrary criteria, because kids are too stupid and immature to know what’s really important.
And that’s exactly what people use modern technology for: they use it to entertain themselves and to participate in some social network with arbitrary and worthless comparative ranking. They thirst for attention and approval, and dread ridicule and criticism, and in they fears they primarily dole out ridicule and criticism. Essentially, the entire social network is a cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, ridicule and criticism of others and never satiated desire for approval. In order to earn others’ approval, people adopt one of the few memes and quasi-philosophies, and there’s no place for real diversity of opinion, because if you want approval of others there’s only one thing you want: you want a choice, an opinion and a philosophy that will earn you most approval, and everything else is secondary. That’s why you want the best phone, the best computer, the best camera, the best philosophy: you want others to recognize you as worthy and to approve of you.
You know what I told my kids about peer pressure and desire for peer approval? “Just accept the fact that you’ll never be accepted by all people, or even the majority of people. The only way you can get approval of idiots is to be an even worse idiot than they are. The only way to get approval of average people is to be slightly below average. What you need to do is accept the fact that whatever you do and whatever you choose, someone will try to shit on you. Even if you’re Jesus they’ll crucify you. That’s how people are and that’s what they do, and the thing is, you can never know if they are sincere, if someone is shitting on you because he honestly dislikes what you do, or if he’s just jealous. You need to measure your success by how much you are succeeding at realizing your personal goals, not by what others say. If you want feedback from others, ask the adults, who actually have a developed brain and a reasonable set of criteria, not children who are stupid and immature.”
That’s how people are abusing the technology. They use it to try to get peer approval, and instead they get to participate in a giant hen-house as a part of the pecking order, where they don’t learn anything really useful, except how to efficiently insult others and make them feel worthless, because they know what worked on them.
If you only let go of people and their bullshit approval, you can find great stuff on the Internet, stuff that can make all that technology worth while. You can find an abundance of downloadable books and music, that you can store on your mobile device and read. You can find excellent articles about ancient Rome and topology on Wikipedia. You can find analytical tools that can interpret common language queries as mathematical equations. Or you can get caught in some meme in order to get group approval on some forum.
I always use the best technology I can afford, if I find it useful. You should, too. However, to use it in order to create a virtual pub in which you’ll waste time trying to “be popular” is an abuse of opportunity. So, it turns out that I’m not really skeptical of technology; I just think most people are idiots to whom technologically facilitated social networking is as harmful as an orgasm button to a rat: it feels good, but eventually the poor animal dies of hunger and thirst pressing the damn thing all day.
> Essentially, the entire social network is a cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, ridicule and criticism of others and never satiated desire for approval.
I think it’s also fair enough to say that people are gathering around social networks like flies around shit. Many are defending this as if it were the meaning of life to have own profile at some social network to wast own time, and they think that all other people who read or do something else are obviously not normal. I also heard that if you don’t have your own profile on Facebook nowadays, you actually don’t exist. There is no need to speak of constant pressures by others about opening my own profile. How long will it take until they realize that people are no same?
Well, it seems that the very purpose of Facebook is to try to prove that all humans are the same and that all are interchangeable, that all can be reduced to a very simplistic connection interface and a behavioral pattern. Everyone who attempts to prove otherwise is undesirable.
I, however, think that a topical mailing list (or a forum or whatever), a website as a source of non-specific information, and an e-mail address are actually all you really need in order to get all the benefits of technology. Facebook is an attempt to simplify all that and to cater to technologically illiterate people in order to harvest their data and sell it to the advertisers.
I saw a youtube rant today where the author thought that smartphones are something that wastes your time, but I disagree. I have a very good smartphone and it doesn’t waste my time. That’s because I don’t use it for social networking, which is the real problem, because you end up reading and writing stupid shit without any significant purpose or goal. I have an eye-popping amounts of technology, but I use it for research, for writing, for work, for photo editing, for reading books and listening to music. It’s all greatly useful, and just by omitting a few traps for wasting time I manage to reap all the benefits while not having the major drawbacks. I would never want to replace my Note 3 for an old Nokia candy bar, but then again I don’t stare at it while walking at the street like a zombie checking instagram and facebook. I use it to be able to leave home and do many things and still have most of my office functionality with me.
I am one of those who “don’t exist” and sometimes I am looked upon as a weird, as who the hell hasn’t facebook!? I actually had facebook account in high school but used it little and declared that I don’t need it anymore. Very soon, others were full of questions about my very “weird” move and when will I again open the account.
Pretty much ridiculous…
For any potential tool, I ask myself “what is it good for”? Does it improve something I already do? Does it empower me to do things I wanted to do but couldn’t, before?
I have a strong aversion to “social mingling” and smalltalk, and so I stay away form either IRL or computerized versions thereof. I was never the kind of person to hang out in a bar, or “go out” in the evening. I prefer to know people well and have in-depth conversations about important issues.
I am aware that there are people who will think me strange for it, but I don’t think I’m strange, I think I’m approaching things properly, and they are shallow and superficial idiots.
The reason why I don’t use social media (for the most part; I use g+ because it has a good photo gallery and I can post notifications about interesting stuff there) is that it doesn’t help me do the things I want to do. All it can do is waste my time while I check out stupid shit written by people who don’t have anything important to say, or if they do, they certainly won’t do it on Facebook or Twitter. They will write articles and books and they will be found elsewhere.
Facebook also seems to be an Internet-replacement tool for IT-illiterate people, which is fine if you always wanted to mingle with technologically illiterate people. I, however, tend to shy away from such places because people who are technologically illiterate also tend to be mentally limited in other ways. I occasionally observe the thoughts written in the comment sections of forums, on Youtube and on Facebook, and my opinion is that it’s the lowest possible octave of human mental activity. Basically, those people are the worst kind to be involved with and I don’t want any part of it.
I decided not to open it unless it’s really necessarily and if there’s no other way to contact a particular person to get my answers, something like the admin person of some online project is responding to his customers only through the Facebook comment section and it’s me who want’s an answer/solution so I have to use this network to contact him. So, I used it because there was no other way of contact. But, as before, I don’t use social networks. I search through the web for interesting content. Also, email is pretty much all I need these days.
If you need it, you need it, that’s not a problem. If I needed it for something I’d open the account as well, but the way it is now, the social media phenomenon turned into some kind of a cancer of the Internet, that consumes all the energy and focus of billions of people and turns it into advertisement revenue and stress.
In my opinion, the single most useful thing one can do in order to maximize the usefulness of Internet and reduce noise is to opt out of social media, or, at least, use it in a focused way for specific purposes.